# a brief summary ## Here’s how your mental illness affects me - It hurts me to see you suffering, because I love you. That includes just being unhappy but also lack of self-caring behaviors like eating well* and staying active. - Being preoccupied with worry about how you are, how you’re going to react to situations, how you’re going to treat your sisters, or whether you’re going to hurt yourself or make self-destructive decisions, makes me less able to be fully functioning and alive and present for my family and my job and myself. - Getting some insight into what’s going on with you really helps—like the other night in the car when you said you feel unloved. That explains a lot. But the irony of it is, when you’re in these darker periods, it feels to me (us, I think) as if you’re not letting us love you. We want to, but you disengage; you withdraw; you get irritable, impatient, suspicious, short-tempered, and occasionally downright mean. I believe that you’re not doing that on purpose, but it still takes its toll. - I don’t know what to tell your sisters when I insist that everyone help out around the house but then it looks like that means everyone except you. When you’re in a more positive, more engaged state of mind, you do help out. But during times like these, you very often don’t.** If someone’s sick, I don’t expect them to do the normal amount of work. But I don’t think you want to exchange household responsibilities for complacency in being seen as an invalid. - I think you should reconsider the meds; comparing now to a couple months ago, now seems a lot more volatile. You told me in the car that you hate school, can’t sleep, hate everything, hate yourself, don’t want to go home, and “every emotion is like times 50” and you “don’t know how to turn it down.” I’m pretty sure the meds were helping with at least some of that. I got the feeling you view going back on them as some kind of failure or defeat, and I think I can understand how that could be, but something has to change. If it’s not going to be meds, it needs to be real, consistent progress on some other way to regulate. Not half-measures and not merely good intentions. I hate the idea of forcing people to take meds, and I don’t intend to try anything like that, but to be perfectly honest, it’s starting to feel unfair of you to continue not to at this point. Past experience tells me that you’re someone who wants and tries to get better. You’ve come through hard times in the past. You’ve sought out help when you needed to, and you’re doing that now. I see little signs that you’re trying—like when I took you to work and you wore your headphones in the car and didn’t say one word to me, but then when you got out you did manage to say thank you. I got the feeling that that took some effort, and I appreciate little things like that. I’ll try as hard as I can to remember the things you’ve told me and shown me, and be as patient and kind and supportive as I can. Meanwhile, I still have expectations that need to be met, because, as I said, I’m not willing to spend my days and nights all knotted up with worry and tension: - check in before you leave; don’t just leave - we agree beforehand on when you’ll be back - let me know where you are; update when that changes - give me contact info for someone you’re with - I want to feel comfortable letting you go to the Rave and stuff like that because I think it helps you, but I can’t do that in good conscience if you don’t seem to be in a stable or safe enough state of mind. - food, shelter, transportation, electricity, heat, internet—none of this is free; *Everyone needs to contribute; basic respect for house rules and consideration for the needs of others is part of that contribution.* - **Don’t lie to me. You lied to me about the WiFi thing. What else are you lying about? This is extremely troublesome in so many ways.** *Your food choices are a particularly sore point for me for some reason. Watching you slowly poison yourself with non-nutritive artificial crap, when I work hard to ensure that you don’t have to, feels like a personal insult. You sometimes get downright belligerent when I try to steer you towards actual food. It just feels childish and asinine and it literally makes me feel like screaming. **Bringing your three-day-old food-encrusted dishes down to leave in the sink seems to be about as far as you’re willing to go some days. When I do insist that you do a certain job, it sometimes stirs up so much angst and drama that I’d literally rather just do it myself. Again, I understand that none of this is intentionally antagonistic, but it’s still a problem. ***just general observations - volatility - defiance. Argues, disagrees, demands justification, judges, or takes personally about things I can just ask the others to do with relatively little fuss - when someone’s convinced they’re unloved, it’s hard to change their mind - “special treatment” is a temporary anodyne that backfires - instantly shifts to demonization; forgets all the former good stuff when crossed or threatened - doubles down on the lie; when called on the lie, changes the subject to anything else that reframes her as the victim or justified —even something that’s not clearly logically connected to the topic at hand. And just like—*why?* why not just ask me if you could share the password? Or if you knew I wouldn’t want to but decided to do it anyway, why not keep quiet? *Why did you bring it up just to lie about it?* - has a hard time saying plain old “sorry, i was wrong”—unless it’s a hyperinflated, venomous attack of an apology that basically amounts to “SORRY I AM SUCH A HORRIBLE PERSON AND YOU’RE MAKING ME FEEL BAD BECAUSE OF YOUR UNREASONABLE DEMANDS OR ATTITUDE I SHOULD JUST DIE” or whatever - outsized sense of injustice/unfairness; assumes people don’t like her and are singling her out for unfair treatment - can be downright mean and callous but then turn around and by hypersensitive to the vaguest hint of an insult or inconvenience to herself - literally seems to hear or remember different words than were said, or to rearrange the order or the emphasis or the context of them. Ex: “It comes across as manipulative when you do that.” —> “OH, SO NOW YOU’RE COMPARING ME TO MY MOTHER!!!!” I can’t count the number of times she’s said “But you said that...” and the thing she seems to think I said was totally different from what I actually said, or missing a key qualifier, or has a personal attack element added into it that, if you were to play back the actual words, just simply wasn’t there. - I probably have compared her to her mother before, in different ways. So maybe sometimes it’s just that she holds on to shit and buries it and then it comes puking out when she’s scared or mad or threatened or whatever - Like her mom, she punishes with her attitude until you start acting right and get back in her good graces. - My relationship with her is probably kind of fucked up